Rand Paul Slams Fauci for ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Coronavirus Response: ‘Huge Mistake’ if Schools Don’t Reopen
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci during a Tuesday Senate hearing for a “one-size-fits-all” coronavirus response, calling it “kind of ridiculous” and adding that Fauci is not “the end-all.”
“We’re opening up a lot of economies around the U.S., and I hope the people predicting doom and gloom saying ‘Oh, we can’t do this, there’s going to be a surge,’ will admit that they were wrong, that there isn’t a surge,” Paul told Fauci during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Paul, an ophthalmologist, in March became the first senator to test positive for Covid-19. However, he said the virus hadn’t become a significant problem for his state. “In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels, in Kentucky and other states. We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season. That’s not to say this isn’t deadly, but really, outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide.”
He also honed in comments Fauci made indicating a vaccine would not be available in time for the 2020 school season. “I think the one-size-fits-all, [the idea] that we’re going to have a national strategy and nobody’s going to go to school, is kind of ridiculous. We really ought to be doing it school district by school district, and the power needs to be dispersed, because people make wrong predictions.
“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent … are not going to learn for a full year,” Paul added. “I think it’s a huge mistake if we don’t open our schools in the fall.”
Committee Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander asked Fauci to address Paul’s comments, especially with respect to whether he said schools would be able to open in the fall. Earlier in the hearing, Fauci responded to a question about whether schools could reopen by saying it was a “bridge too far” to expect a vaccine to be available by that time.
Fauci failed to answer that question directly but emphasized the virus could be harmful to children as well as adults. “We don’t know everything about this virus and we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. The more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe.
“For example, right now children presented with Covid-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome,” he added. “I think we better be careful … in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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